Rae Bermanoff may look like the quintessential Brooklyn hipster, but beneath the cat’s-eye glasses and artisan jewelry lurks the heart of a 19th-century peasant. Or the stomach, at least.

Bermanoff and her husband, Noah, are the proprietors of Mile End Delicatessen in Brooklyn, a shoebox-sized storefront devoted to Montreal-style smoked meats and Jewish comfort food made the way their ancestors made them, from scratch, with no shortcuts — chicken soup made with whole chickens, kasha varnishkes with hand-formed bowtie pasta, hot borscht with a base of long-simmered beet stock.

Instead of dragging Jewish food kicking and kvetching into the 21st century — upside-down caramel cranberry noodle kugel! herbed spinach latkes with feta-yogurt sauce! — they’ve spawned a large following and a new cookbook, for traditional, and traditionally made, Jewish food

The salami served at the deli — the result of long hours at a piston-style crank stuffer and over the smoker — is based on a salami that neither Noah nor Rae had ever eaten themselves. It’s made of ground fatty brisket and ground beef short rib, with a spice mixture of black peppercorns and yellow mustard, fennel and cumin seeds with Hungarian paprika, granulated onion and plenty of garlic.

Noah smokes the salami at incrementally graded low temperatures over nearly six hours. That’s followed by an hour in the ice bath (the salami, not Noah) and a week of refrigeration before it’s ready to serve. “In our early days, a 90-something-year-old woman told us she hadn’t eaten salami like that for 50 years, so she affirmed we were on the right track,” Rae says.

The Montreal-style smoked meat — the legendary dry-cured smoked brisket of Noah’s hometown — takes nearly two weeks to make, and the couple also salt-cures its own salmon, whips up its own lemon mayo and pickles anything and everything — eggs, mushrooms, red onions, green tomatoes, fennel, beets and cherry peppers. And let’s not forget the pickled lamb’s tongue served on pumpernickel toast with raisin-onion marmalade.

QUENTIN BACONRae and Noah Bermanoff met in Montreal, where love bloomed over the cityâs iconic smoked meat. The couple now owns Mile End Delicatessen in Brooklyn, offering deli and Jewish comfort food.

This kind of nose-to-tail cooking isn’t new to the artisan food scene (at least not in Brooklyn), but it is somewhat of a lost art in Jewish cooking, in which many delicacies evolved out of necessity and resourcefulness. Call it punim-to-ptcha cooking — although jellied calves’ feet are not on the menu at Mile End. Yet.

“In a lot of cases, we looked back at some of the recipes we inherited, and actually if you follow the basics processes, that will create the best dish,” Rae says. “The secret is sort of not trying to take the shortcut. We’re trying to skip that point in mid-century when everything became about modern convenience and one-pot meals, and putting dinner on the table fast as possible.”

In “The Mild End Cookbook: Redefining Jewish Comfort Food from Hash to Hamantaschen” (Clarkson Potter, $27.50), just out, Noah writes that schmaltz, or rendered chicken fat, best embodies their mission: “Nothing wasted, everything savored.” Rae calls schmaltz the Jewish equivalent of olive oil and says it adds richness to their knishes, matzoh balls and kasha varnishkes. Rae and Noah also use it in place of oil in their vinaigrette and spreads it liberally over sweet homemade challah for the chicken salad sandwich.

Bermanoff’s great-grandparents were South Jersey chicken farmers, so you could say schmaltz runs in her blood. Her ancestors also include hoteliers from Lakewood, but slinging hash — even artisan, hand-cut hash — was not what she expected to do when she grew up.

After graduating from the Frisch School in Paramus, she went to McGill University in Montreal to study art. That’s where she met Noah, who grew up in the Montreal suburbs, and where she came to enjoy the enormous Shabbat and holiday spreads engineered by his beloved grandmother, Nana Lee, who passed away in 2009 but whose spirit can be found in every recipe.

CLARKSON POTTER"The Mile End Cookbook" was published earlier this month.

After graduation, the couple moved to New York, where Rae got a job producing audio tours for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Noah enrolled in law school, which he soon found to be a “sensory wasteland.” He stoked his creative juices instead in brisket, spending hours on his roof trying to coax his childhood from the depths of a smoker. Law school didn’t stand a chance. In 2010, they opened Mile End with a tiny menu.

They didn’t even offer chicken soup for the first two months because they believed nothing they cooked would compare with the soup their customers grew up with. “The memory of your grandmother’s chicken soup will always be the most satisfying,” Rae says.

And even though both Rae and Noah were partial to their respective grandmothers’ recipes, it’s now on the menu, with an embarrassment of starches: matzo ball, kreplach and mandel, schmaltz-infused soup crackers. On the catering side of the business, their brisket, braised in red wine with prunes, is the most popular Rosh Hashanah offering (the Jewish New Year starts Sunday night).

“When we opened the restaurant, we didn’t anticipate that the food was going to speak to people in such a deep way,” Rae says. “It’s this hobby my husband had, trying to recreate the food of his childhood. We were really taken aback. We were honored really, that we could spark such a real emotional reaction in our guests.”